Game Studies as Field, Formation, and Geography: A Conversation

Springer eBooks, 2021

Locality has largely been left out of game history, at least until recently. The orthodoxy that the U.S. and Japan constituted the 'centres' at the outset of the video game industry has enjoyed such legitimacy that many accounts do not bother to mention the where that their material or statistics pertain to. That many histories have been written by journalists, collectors, and other 'insiders'-comprising what Erkki Huhtamo famously calls the "chronicle era" of game history (Huhtamo 2005, 4)-largely accepting the game industry's 'global' rhetoric, has no doubt contributed to this situation. I largely agree with Henry Lowood and Raiford Guins who, reflecting on such chronicles, write, "This is a mode of writing history consumed with the 'when' and 'what' to the detriment of the 'why' and 'how'" (Lowood and Guins 2016, xiii); however, to their formulation of what is missing, I would add consideration of the 'where'. In general, location has been a massive blind spot in game history. At least until relatively recently, histories of digital games have been written

2006

The range of different digital games and the geographical and cultural range of game playing has expanded greatly during their years of adoption. Initially isolated into research laboratories and universities, digital games are currently within the reach of billions of people–in the form of mobile phone games, if not as computer games or video games for various arcade and home consoles.

Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences

This paper examines the prominence of East and Southeast Asia as a focus of communications and game studies. The idea of going regional when researching video games comes from the fact that each locale has its trait to construct its gaming industry and gaming environment from which the gaming experience is also reflected differently. The reasons provided, ranging from the regional market's dynamic nature to the attention that the governing states have paid to the gaming industry, help place Asia-Pacific in general and East and Southeast Asia particularly in the global gaming juxtaposition where the other part is usually the Western countries. Examples that help highlight the rising prominence of the regions as the most potential areas are also considered. This review's findings indicate that East and Southeast Asia have gradually built up their reputation by actively joining the designing, processing, and distributing digital products system. Thus, the focus of future research on the regions should be more concerned with video gaming. Keywords Creative industries • East asia game research • Game culture • Media governance southeast asia

G|A|M|E Games as Art, Media, Entertainment, 2020

This article explores the early history (and even some prehistory) of game studies from a perspective that is informed by an analysis of claimed opposition between "objective" and "politically committed" research. There is a well-documented and long intellectual history of fundamental disagreements that have set apart the various idealist, rationalist, positivist, empiricist, and constructivist orientations in academia, for example. However, the contemporary climate of "culture wars" has surrounded such disputes with a novel, o en toxic framing that aggravates confrontations and erodes possibilities for reaching agreement. This article tracks the charged prehistory of contemporary game studies on one hand into the rise of poststructuralism and the "theory wars" of 1970s and 1980s, and then moves to discuss the heritage of literary studies for game studies. The special emphasis is put on formalism as a strategy of manufacturing authority

Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2022

As members of the Critical Approaches to Technology and the Social (CATS) Lab at UC Irvine, we are particularly motivated by this special issue’s call to action. As a collective of interdisciplinary students at various stages in relevant degrees, we are the future of game studies. As such, this question strikes us not as one for speculation, but as a space to commit a set of shared values necessary for game studies to have a future—one that is more equitable, more sustainable, and more transparent. We argue that working towards this future will require an increased commitment to critiquing the relationship between industry and game-making practice; examining the sociopolitical landscape of both game culture and the world; and an attention to the institution of the university itself. Imagining the future in this way is a necessary practice, and a core component to scholarly critique. When we imagine the future, we can work both towards and against it. We do this work as researchers, but also as streamers, makers, critics, and players, each of whom brings our perspective to this special issue to articulate our vision of a critical game studies that strives for equity, sustainability, and self-reflexivity.

Routledge Companion to Literature and Science, 2010

Digital games might have been considered cultish or adolescent two decades ago, but interest in them is now mainstream and ranges across diverse social and cultural groupings. Their appeal is now so broad and pervasive, and their inventiveness and their claim on a distinct aesthetic so compelling, that they demand attention from across the academic spectrum, prompting the rise of the multi-disciplinary field of Game Studies.

The capacity for games to shed light on various sociocultural, political, and economic issues is immense. The games people play link into a sense of place. In a period marked by multiple emerging forms of mobility and propinquity that inform how we experience place, locality, and intimacy, game cultures can provide much insight. Gaming cultures reflect local cultures as well as provide links between transnational communities. However, what does locality mean in the context of contemporary notions of community and transnational flows? What are the rules, tactics, and forms of resistance of place? And how are these practices and cultures reflected in one of the dominant players in the games industry, the Asia-Pacific region? It is with these questions in mind that this issue explores games as a barometer of emerging forms of mobility, neo-regionalism, and modernity.

The Game Culture Reader, 2013

In their Introduction the authors eschew the three dominate video game topics of violence, sexism, and addiction and maintain that these overemphasize an agentive media consumption practice while obscuring other topics, namely video game production and distribution practices. Thompson and Ouellette call for preserving the complexity of the medium and its study, claiming that Game Studies must "reject the dominant, apolitical discourse that would consign digital games to irrelevant spheres of harmless child play or invidious mass entertainment."